The Marginalian
The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
Latest Posts
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a...
Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the...
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible. “Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) wrote to his boyhood...
“The universe is the ultimate free lunch.” “Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” the trailblazing astronomer and leading Figuring figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth...
Ravishing otherworldly wonders of the cosmos beneath the surface, from the first expedition to prove that life exists in the depths. “While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie,” naturalist Sy Montgomery wrote in her...
“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.” There is a form of being together that feels as easy and...
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her...
“Nothing beats kindness… It sits quietly beyond all things.” “What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” the Proust Questionnaire asked David Bowie. “Living in fear.” Partway in time between Proust and Bowie, the young Hannah...
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family....
“In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay...
“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” “Love, but be careful what you...
Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity,...
“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.” “Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a...
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the...
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our...